Of course, current limited resources will mean that only a portion of the human population will be able to shift to the E10 unit and leave behind their fleshy bodies, but we are committed to an ethical, balanced distribution among the rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown; between man and woman, among all nations and races.
Arnon D’Bvaym
64BIT CHECKED THE master’s pulse and shook the man lightly to see if he would wake. His hands shook as he did so, and he looked up in the direction Cortex had been taken. He wanted to puke. His innards roiled from fear, fear over losing the secrets that the master might hold, fear for Cortex’s safety, fear for his friends as they contended with Id and her rozies.
The words that the master had spoken were still burned in his mind: Take the boy if ye dare. I’ve broken him, and without him the prophecy is broken. Ye could wait for another—aye, waiting may be yer best plan. But the end of the prophecy has lost its certainty. I do not believe that yer master will listen to ye; but this world’s end is no longer set. He knew of no other person that the master had broken but him, unless the master wasn’t speaking literally—but what then?
There wasn’t time to analyze his fears and predictions. 64Bit looked around again. Near where Cortex and the strange rozie with camera eyes had been, the dark technomancer twitched in the air, hands moving vaguely in tune with her battling rozies. With the column of wires and tubes extending from her back and into the ceiling, she truly looked like a cancerous growth that had sprouted from the rozie factory itself. The thought chilled 64Bit further. He crouched protectively over the master and quickly surveyed the rest of the room—he seemed to have been forgotten in the melee.
As if summoned by the thought, the rozie with short hair hopped off Zed and turned toward 64Bit. Zed stood, beaten and battered and revealing as much of his metallic frame as synthetic skin, and stared forward with his one undamaged eye. His expression was flat—not cold, not predatory, but flat, like the mindless rozies in Fort. That realization chilled 64Bit. As much as 64Bit had feared the red-mouthed rozie, Zed had still represented a form of protection. If Id had full control of him, 64Bit couldn’t imagine any ending other than a painful, messy death for the rest of them.
A metallic screech filled the air. 64Bit flicked his eye screens toward the trunk, the long-nailed rozie . . . and Kayla. The little barbarian had joined the fray and succeeded in burying her knife to the hilt in the rozie’s eye as the trunk pinned it against a table. The rozie thrashed violently and shrieked, but Kayla held on with a grim determination, striking the butt of the knife with the palm of her hand to force it in deeper. A gray-and-red liquid began bubbling out of the rozie’s eye and it shuddered to a stop.
The trunk immediately dropped the rozie and turned around. Despite the trunk not having eyes, 64Bit got the distinct sense that the trunk was staring down the two remaining rozies: Zed and Id’s short-haired monster. Zed reached over and popped the short-haired rozie’s limp arm back into place. The trunk lowered its front and opened its lid slightly; a low buzz of humming saws emanated from the trunk, sounding distinctly like a growl. 64Bit’s heart hammered in his chest as he watched the trunk and the rozies square off.
Westley shouted, “Id’s wasting time! More rozies are coming!” and pointed with his uninjured arm. 64Bit looked to the door they had entered from and saw that Westley was right—a brown rozie with uncoordinated movement marking it as fresh stumbled through the door. Fortunately, it was alone—for the moment.
The trunk turned and jumped toward Id, clearing a table and bulling through lab equipment as it did so, but even from the top of a table, it couldn’t jump high enough to reach her. Zed and the short-haired rozie jumped into action as well, grabbing at the trunk’s spiderlike legs and pulling it back.
Id let out a low, slow, throaty chuckle. I wonder what is to be learned from pulling this thing apart. Her gloating thoughts echoed through the room, directed at no one in particular.
The rozies wrestled with the trunk, trying to pin it to the floor. Westley began waving his uninjured arm, trying to attract the attention of the new rozie, while Kayla retrieved her knife from the dead rozie and watched the newcomer warily—she wouldn’t be backing up the ferocity of the trunk this time. And 64Bit realized that he had been standing in place, hovering over the master, while everyone acted around him.
They were going to be overwhelmed. The trunk snapped its lid and stabbed with its spider legs; it easily threw off the short-haired rozie but only weakly resisted Zed, appearing unwilling to hurt him even while he was being controlled by Id.
They were going to die. Kayla jumped on the new rozie’s back and attempted to stab it in the eye, but she missed, gouging its cheek instead. The rozie swiped at her and sent the knife flying, then stepped in the way as Westley ran toward it.
64Bit looked at his companions, the ones he sometimes thought of as friends even if he had never said it aloud, then back at the master. He had already chosen his unconscious master over Cortex—was it worth making the same decision again, dragging the master from the room and hoping to escape to the surface, while the melee distracted everyone else?
“Westley!” Kayla shouted as the fresh rozie backhanded him, leaving a long gash on his forehead and sending a spray of blood through the air.
“I’m a fool,” 64Bit said with a gulp, looking around him. The rozie arm that Zed had ripped off its owner earlier was nearby, wires sticking out of where it had attached to the shoulder. A few assorted items were on the ground around the master—64Bit didn’t know if the trunk had belched them out with him, or if they had fallen from the tables. He saw several small particle batteries, so he grabbed them and then dashed toward the arm.
“Not a real technomancer . . . can’t control things with just my mind . . . built broken . . . can’t command rozies . . .” 64Bit muttered as he wrapped naked wires around the batteries and tied shredded synthetic skin together to hold the contraption into place. “Guess I just have to get my hands dirty.”
He held up the arm, which had begun twitching, then hovered his gloved palm over its middle and issued a command to grab a nearby shard of glass. Instead, the arm began weakly thrashing and grabbing at everything nearby, squeezing whatever it held till it broke. 64Bit grunted—maybe Id had built the limbs of her rozies to be capable of some function, even when not attached to the main shell. But if this short, messy experiment proved his hypothesis: the arm wasn’t capable of accepting specific commands, but would act wildly when commanded. Hopefully. Otherwise his work would be for nothing. 64Bit grabbed the base of the arm, careful to keep the twitching and grabbing hand far away from him, and began crawling under the tables toward Id.
Chaos filled 64Bit’s ears. Westley and Kayla’s screams and cries sounded like the voices of the damned, repeating endlessly that they were doomed. The groans of the rozies seemed as unstoppable as the movement of the earth, each one symbolic of inevitable defeat and despair. Even the clacking, snapping, and buzzing of the trunk slowed to a crawl, this one seemingly-unstoppable ally defeated when faced against its companion, the one thing it loved in all the world—if it were possible for pseudotech spider-trunks to love.
64Bit almost didn’t believe it when he finally saw Id’s feet floating before him, up in the air. She was suspended above a lab table, watching the fight. Her swollen, purple-and-green feet swayed before 64Bit’s eyes. 64Bit took a deep breath, crawled out from under the table, and stood.
Id turned and looked at 64Bit. The surprise in her eyes betrayed that she had completely forgotten about him. 64Bit really could have crawled away and he wouldn’t have been missed.
“Here!” 64Bit shouted, then lobbed the arm up toward Id. The dark technomancer’s good eye narrowed on the arm briefly before the limb exploded into motion, thrashing and grabbing in the air until it struck Id’s face, crumpling her nose, then caught onto one of the tubes extending from Id’s back and squeezed until it exploded. Id screamed, her arms twitching and trying to raise, fight the arm off, but they couldn’t. 64Bit, even though he wasn’t a rozie, could feel the concentration rolling off Id as she tried to command the arm to stop, but that just caused it to thrash all the more wildly, disconnecting more tubes and wires from Id’s back.
64Bit grinned—for once, being able to command things mentally seemed to be a detriment.
Zed screamed.
64Bit jumped in fright, then turned and saw Zed standing on top of the trunk, roaring, his mouth opened wide enough to begin ripping his synthetic cheeks. He then tore the short-haired rozie’s head off with one savage tug.
Joy swept through 64Bit’s heart like a wildfire. Id must have lost her concentration on Zed; enough of Zed’s will must have remained for him to take control the moment she lost her focus. Then 64Bit realized that Zed’s arm was pulled back to throw the head, aimed directly at the dark technomancer above him.
Before 64Bit could move, Zed launched the short-haired rozie’s head. It screamed through the air like a rocket, then passed through Id’s chest with an explosion of blood, gore, and whatever was flowing through the tubes that sustained Id’s body.
Pieces of her shredded corpse remained in place, limply hanging by the same tubes and wires, while other pieces sprayed through the air; viscous liquid poured from several tubes, covering 64Bit, the table below Id, and pouring off both onto the ground in a foul-smelling puddle.
I’m . . . alive, 64Bit thought. He slowly stood and watched as Zed tore apart the remaining rozie, breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces. Whatever hate-filled energy fueled Zed, though, seemed to wane quickly after killing the creature. After punching its chest a few times, he slumped his shoulders and stared downward, entirely motionless. As he sat there, the trunk approached him and settled by his side, tapping the floor rhythmically with one of its legs.
64Bit shakily made his way to Westley and Kayla. He heard groans and growls coming from the hallway; they would need to run soon. However, Westley and Zed clearly needed help, first. Westley’s face was white—where it wasn’t covered in blood—as Kayla grabbed his limp arm and twisted it.
“Not broken—dislocated. I’ve worked on these things before. You just have to—”
“Stop, stop!” 64Bit cried, pushing Kayla away and gently taking Westley’s arm. “You’ll tear his shoulder tissue if you twist it like that. You don’t need to work it so hard—you just need the right leverage and a very small pop.” 64Bit would have preferred putting Westley on a painkiller prior to putting his arm back into place, but also acknowledged the limits of the situation. 64Bit positioned Westley’s arm carefully, pushed firmly with his palm near the base of Westley’s arm, and Westley grunted loudly as his shoulder relocated. Westley glanced at his arm with a dazed expression and slumped against the wall, pupils contracting and expanding.
Kayla was at Westley’s side, ensuring he didn’t slip to the ground. “Not a single complaint or tear—not bad for the governor’s boy,” Kayla commented. She lifted Westley’s good arm over her shoulder, ostensibly to support him, but their height difference meant that Westley would have to slouch significantly for Kayla’s shoulders to be of any use to him.
“You look like a raw steak,” Westley murmured. 64Bit looked down at himself and, with disgust, had to agree with Westley—Id’s death had left him covered with pieces of the dark technomancer. 64Bit did his best to suppress a shudder as he began wiping himself off.
“Good work, technoboy,” Kayla said. 64Bit flinched, waiting for the follow-up insult. “I thought we were going to die while you crouched there. I won’t pretend that I thought you had a plan in mind—but good job shaking it off and doing something. Very good.”
64Bit looked away and felt his cheeks burning. “Thanks.” He wanted to thank Westley and Kayla for being brave enough to fight from the beginning but found it hard to speak. Westley murmured something, but 64Bit didn’t listen—instead, he looked across the room to the door Cortex had been carried out of. As if to confirm 64Bit’s fears that the other acolyte was certainly dead, the growing groans and growls that filled the air materialized in the form of a crowd of rozies that began lurching into the room from that direction.
64Bit felt cold, hard hands grab his waist and lift him into the air. Before 64Bit could panic, Zed whispered coldly, “There’s nothing holding us back now—let’s move.” Before 64Bit knew what was happening, Zed placed him on the trunk and, sitting beside him, the two were off. They encountered several rozies in the hallway, but the trunk bowled them over and kept moving. As they rode, Zed scratched aggressively at his metal arms, desleeved from his fight with Id’s personal rozies. A firm blow from one of the rozies in the hall sent the trunk skittering to the side, where it hit a wall and almost knocked 64Bit off. Holding himself more firmly to the trunk’s top, 64Bit looked back and saw Kayla and Westley running behind, dodging around the rozies that the trunk had knocked over.
Something was missing.
“The master!” 64Bit cried as the trunk entered a stairwell and began climbing upward. “We have to turn around!”
Zed glanced at 64Bit with cold, flat eyes. “Dead weight,” was all the rozie said.
“Hey! Slow down!” Westley shouted. 64Bit looked back at them and noticed how far ahead Zed and the trunk had pulled. The trunk was moving at a reasonable speed for Kayla and Westley to keep up over a short distance, but they couldn’t keep up a sprint forever, particularly not up several flights of stairs.
64Bit turned back to Zed. “Slow down! We’re losing them!”
The corner of Zed’s mouth twisted. “I told you, when this was all finished I would leave with you and you alone. They can find their own way.”
64Bit stared at Zed for a moment, then looked back at Westley and Kayla. Kayla seemed to have realized what was happening— her face was red, her expression angry, as she charged up the stairs, her short legs pumping furiously to maintain a good pace. Westley, on the other hand, just looked like he was in pain. They had survived so much.
“This isn’t right,” 64Bit said. He slumped his shoulders and turned forward, but his mind raced. Then, when he thought Zed had stopped paying attention to him—the rozie had become strangely focused on scratching his bare arms—and when they were on a flat part of the stairwell, he rolled backward off the trunk.
Zed’s hand snaked out and grabbed 64Bit before he could hit the ground. One-handed, the rozie lifted him up and set him back down beside him. Then Zed placed a cold, metal hand on 64Bit’s neck and kept it there.
“Careful, meatborg,” Zed whispered. “You owe me—you’re all alive now because of me.”
64Bit sat, stunned, as the trunk turned a corner and began running up a gentle-sloped tunnel. Light began growing around 64Bit as the trunk ran; ahead, a large opening nearly glowed white with natural sunlight, blue sky, and the promise of flora beyond. As much as 64Bit wanted to stare forward in anticipation of finally escaping this hellhole, he had to keep looking back. Amazingly, Kayla and Westley were still in view—tired, sweating, already at the edge of their limits and being asked to push just a little farther, but still running.
The hallway began to darken.
64Bit whipped his head around and saw a large metal gate begin lowering over the exit. At the pace the trunk was moving they would easily make it through, but . . . 64Bit calculated the distance in his head, looking back at Kayla and Westley as he did so. The odds that they reached the surface in time were incredibly slim.
64Bit jabbed Zed in the side with his elbow, then gasped in pain—the thin layer of synthetic skin had done little to protect 64Bit from Zed’s metal chest. 64Bit forced himself to ignore the pain and began pushing and shoving Zed, then trying to wiggle free from his grasp. He shouted, “You said you’d save them! There’s no way they’ll get out in time! We can all pile on the trunk—we’ll be just fast enough. You don’t need to do this.”
Zed continued to stare forward, unblinking, eyes strangely flat, as they rode through the gate and into the sun. 64Bit looked back, feeling as if he couldn’t breathe. Kayla and Westley were so close. . . they might . . .
Just . . .
Make it . . .
Westley, still white with pain, stumbled, then fell to the ground. Despite nearly being out the gate, Kayla skidded to a stop, turned, and ran back in. 64Bit could see her kneel beside Westley, her lips moving, but couldn’t tell what she was saying; she held Westley’s shoulder, then looked up and met 64Bit’s eyes just before the gate closed.
They were gone. Trapped in an underground hellhole.
They’d failed. 64Bit hadn’t rescued the master. He hadn’t gotten any real answers—just more questions.
They hadn’t been able to rescue a single person from Fort. Not even Cortex. They were less now than when they had entered the factory. It had been for nothing.
And Zed had won everything he had wanted.
A fire kindled in 64Bit’s belly.
“You monster!” 64Bit shouted. He began kicking Zed and shoving him, but the rozie was immovable. “You monster! You say you want to live again, but what do you have that’s worth living for? You left them to die—you left them to die, and they helped save you! You’re scum! You’re less than scum—all of creation would be better off without you in it!” 64Bit continued sobbing tearlessly as the rozie ignored him, staring forward like the machine he was. In a final burst of anger, 64Bit grabbed Zed’s arm with his gloved hand and commanded, “Turn around! Help them!”
Zed flinched as if he’d received a firm electric shock.
64Bit realized what he’d just done. He stared in his hand in amazement . . . and horror. He reached out to grab Zed again, to command him again, but Zed caught his forearm, the rozie’s own hand a safe distance from the glove.
Zed turned his head slowly, his eyes burning holes in 64Bit as he did so. “You shouldn’t have done that. We were going to have such a nice journey.”
Zed hopped off the moving trunk. As he did so, the trunk’s lid opened, popping 64Bit into the air. Lid open like a gaping mouth, the trunk bounced upward, catching 64Bit inside and slamming its lid shut.
The last thing 64Bit saw before being trapped in darkness was a brief glimpse of the sun; then the lid snapped with a disturbing air of finality. After that, 64Bit just focused on breathing deeply and not panicking in the unrelenting dark.
Unexpectedly, he felt a small warmth light in his chest; Westley’s earlier words floated through his mind: You’re right, everything is broken. We are broken. The world is broken. And sometimes it seems like things are getting exclusively worse. But if you believe in God, directly, it’s easier to feel that He has everything in hand, no matter what happens.
Trapped in the dark, 64Bit tried to hold on to his faith as he lifted his hand to his breast and prayed. He prayed, and prayed, unaware of time passing, until his mouth was too dry to speak any further. 64Bit rolled over, then shifted when he felt something pressing into his side. He reached his hand down, felt in his pocket, and realized what it was.
The Binary statuette.
“Thank you, Creator,” 64Bit breathed. “Send them quickly!”
Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow
Boo Ludlow 